Venice Days Unveils Global Lineup

This year's Venice Days sidebar will features shorts from Naomi Kawase.

The lineup includes seven female directors.

Venice Days, the independent sidebar to the Venice International Film Festival, on Tuesday unveiled its lineup, with films representing 20 nationalities, seven first works and seven female directors.

The slate includes 11 titles in competition, 10 of them being world premieres. Bruce La Bruce will preside over the jury.

Venice Days will launch the Syrian war video diary The War Show, directed by Andreas Dalsgaard and Obadiah Zytoon. The film follows Zytoon crossing the border from Turkey into the war zone at the beginning of the Syrian civil war.

A variety of genres are represented in the competition, including coming-of age films Heartstone from Guomundur Arnar Guomundsson and Polina from Valerie Muller and Angelin Preljocaj; immigration movie The Road to Mandalay by Midi Z; thriller Hounds of Love from Ben Young; melodramas Indivisible by Edoardo De Angelis and Pamilya Ordinaryo by Eduardo Roy, Jr.; biographical pic Sami Blood from Amanda Kernell; realist film Worldly Girl by Marco Danieli; Western Guilty Men from Ivan D. Gaona; and the grotesque Quit Staring At My Plate by Hana Jusic.

Venice Days continues to place emphasis on female directors with its Miu Miu Women's Tales programming. This year it will features shorts from Naomi Kawase, Seed, and Crystal Moselle, That One Day.

Special event screenings include Always Shine from U.S. director and actress Sophia Takal; Coffee by Cristiano Bortone; Il Profumo Del Tempo Delle Favole from Mauro Caputo; Rocco by Thierry Demaiziere and Alban Teurlai; Vangelo from Pippo Delbono; and You Never Had It — An Evening With Bukowski by Matteo Borgardt, a film created from a forgotten 1981 interview between Charles Bukowski and Italian journalist Silvia Bizio.

The sidebar is set to run Aug. 31-Sept. 10, parallel to the Venice International Film Festival.